When a film about a horror film confronts you with the position that intellectual explanation and discussion get in the way of expressing emotion, presenting it both as a cinematic theme and as a real-life truth, that film is going to stay with you for a while. For that reason, expect spoilers as I recover from watching Jane Schoenbrun’s latest film, “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma”.
There is a scene past the half-way point of this film where Kris Williams, played by Hannah Einbinder, a queer filmmaker hired to reboot a problematic slasher film franchise, “Camp Miasma”, becomes very emotional during a call with executives at describing her new vision of the story. This does not go over well with people that just wanted a revival of a dormant intellectual property with “woke” credentials and a queer voice to paper over the cracks, and you feel her idea has been dismissed as much for her as its merit.
By this point, reboots of slasher films have been shown to be an intellectual exercise, finding ways to repackage what has been as mindless violence or tired tropes: “Camp Miasma” had one in the 2000s, alongside “Halloween”, “Friday the 13th” and “Nightmare on Elm Street”, the latter having already been given the postmodern, metatextual treatment in 1993 with “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare”, starring the franchise’s original “final girl” Heather Langenkamp as her real-life self. I don’t remember the “Scream” and “Scary Movie” franchises being mentioned, but they hardly needed to be. The opening titles of “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” place its fictional franchise as much a part of cultural landscape as the others, through VHS tapes, posters and merchandise to reviews and news articles depicting its decline and reboots, while positioning it as a mirror to “Friday the 13th”, down to using the same font for its title.
The call with executives followed Kris having travelled to meet Billy Presley — played by Gillian Anderson, who can do no wrong —who was the “final girl” in the original 1980 “Camp Miasma” film, never acted again, and has since bought the real-life camp used by the production as their home. Already compared to Norma Desmond from “Sunset Boulevard” before Kris meets her, Billy is a much happier and well-adjusted person than given reason to expect, especially as she contends with Kris’s intellectual positioning of both “Camp Miasma” and of her own life: Kris describes herself as both polyamorous and in a consensual throuple, to which Billy immediately assesses that Kris does not sound happy about that arrangement.
Breaking through layers of emotional repression is at the heart of “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma”. Billy is an artist, but her works are of concentric squares, mirroring the box on the head of the franchise’s slasher villain. As Billy and Kris watch the film together, Billy forcefully draws the same arrangement. A sign already seen among the other artworks reads along the lines of, “if it becomes too much, you can switch it off”, and the film is switched off, albeit by a power cut. Billy says that the sex scene in the film in which she participated turned into a sexual assault, something she overcame by imagining the killer watching them, then killing them after climax. Kris later admits she imagines being pursued and killed as what enables them to do the same, put down to having seen the film at too young an age.
The slasher villain of “Camp Miasma” is named “Little Death” – la petite mort. Once a child at the camp marked out by their changing of gender expression each day, rendered into a boogeyman through successive campfire stories, they were killed and thrown in the lake, coming back to take revenge – the “Sleepaway Camp” series is also referenced, as are Felissa Rose and Pamela Springsteen, both actresses that portrayed the transgender killer Angela Baker in that film, a character similarly singled out as “other” through the emotional reaction of the other characters, and perhaps the intellectual explanation of the filmmakers. The feeling I got was that “Little Death” was more complete as a person, but in a way too unconventional to be allowed to live.
Upon Billy first meeting Kris, Billy tells her that “there is a hole at the bottom of the lake, where the movies come from...”, which is then laughed off as a joke. By the end, this is true: “Little Death” really does live at the bottom of the lake, in a room decorated like a video rental shop, ready to come to the surface and take revenge, the climax of the “final girl” delivering a VHS tape of the latest instalment in the franchise to their shop-room. “Little Death” is the filmmaker, the arbiter, and we are the surreal fodder, to be killed off at a rate of one every 7-8 minutes, if “Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning”, is anything to go by – I did feel the gore shown was more than would have been allowed in 1980. After breaking through layers of repression with Billy, Kris delivers that latest instalment through the killing of what frustrates them, the victims being the executives, agents and lovers that have inexplicably arrived to find them. The title of the new film is the one we have been watching.
And yet, the following morning, Kris and Billy wake up – covered in blood, the literal spear of “Little Death” having been removed from them both, but it’s a new day, and they are full of life. They go to the local store to stock up on more sweets and candies, a recurring motif through the film that I took to be as much of an enjoyment of “empty calories” as the real-life slasher films being parodied here, but they talk about them with such joy and knowledge, just like an audience of slasher films would.
There is a question in Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Against Interpretation”: “What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?” I feel like I have watched one answer to that question. This film completes Jane Schoenbrun’s “screen trilogy”, begum with “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” (2021), about a video game, and “I Saw the TV Glow” (2024), based around a TV show. I have yet to see the first of these films, but we are drawn “through the looking glass” in this latest film just as with “I Saw the TV Glow”, the film grain and dust of film entering “real life”.
Schoenbrun and their team do as good a job of making “Camp Miasma” a “real” franchise as is done with the teen drama “The Pink Opaque” in “I Saw the TV Glow”, playing with our idea of nostalgia – we recognise its footprint, and we acknowledge that the constant reinvention of that nostalgia is not new either, shifting our memory and interpretation of it. Indeed, Schoenbrun was apparently asked about rebooting the “Leprechaun” horror franchise, although I perceived the problems with executives coming from A24, the production company that funded “I Saw the TV Glow”, turning down this film, leading to its eventual funding by the British producer (and streaming service) Mubi. When their novel “Public Access Afterworld” is published in October 2026, continuing the same themes of identity and self-discovery, I will most likely be reading that too.
I don’t know if this will make me want to watch a 1980s slasher film, as I rarely have before now, but they will allow me to understand why they persisted, and still endure.
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